[MD] Greetings from an old friend!

[Johannes Seppänen]

All,
hello, I'm Johannes and I'm broadly interested of philosophy, including Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, Lorin Friesen's Mental Symmetry, the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg and C. G. Jung and many others. I'm also your old pal Tuukka's friend. Tuukka has reported some technical difficulty joining MD. The Mailman system says he will receive a message when he has either been accepted or rejected to the list, yet he has received neither. So I will deliver a message from him.

Johannes

***

All,
the manuscript of my book Zen and the Art of Insanity is done. I have a foreword from Ciaran Healy (www.ruthlesstruth.com) and another foreword from Antti Kukkonen (MA, M.Soc.Sci). The former indicates that my book is a worthwhile read even for someone who doesn't quite get it. The latter is a more expert-oriented introduction to the philosophical content. The book won't be out in some time, but I will post these forewords in the near future.

I find Antti's foreword to be a manifestation of something I have never before seen: an academic philosopher actually understands the Metaphysics of Quality and, furthermore, goes on to relativize the Metaphysics of Quality to mainstream philosophy by making comparisons and interpretations. Nota bene: I am not familiar with McWatt's work, but I would assume him to have already made comparisons and interpretations between the Metaphysics of Quality and mainstream philosophy.

Antti finds my work to be an important contribution to process philosophy and a general theory of emergence. He also finds it to emphasize, how neoclassical economy produces models of capitalism, but these models are not a justification of capitalism. This message is relevant in our time, as innocent lives are at stake when investors make speculations of the future price of food.

As far as I can tell from this, Antti is highly aware of the detrimental effect subject-object-metaphysics has had to philosophy. He compares my work to that of Hegel, but notes that Hegel found nature to be the "other" and devoid of meaning. Therefore Hegel had to adhere to subject-object-metaphysics and develop his philosophy as if reality were split into two separate parts: one of culture, idea or subject, and the meaningless world or nature. He calls this the self-inflicted imprisonment of modern philosophy, "a legacy of post Kantian thought that was hardly satisfactorily solved in the big enterprises of 20th century philosophy".

Antti proceeds to contemplate my work using Joseph Rouse's views on simulacra as the starting point: "simulacra ... transforms the available possibilities for human action. They do so both by materially enabling some activites and obstructing others and also by changing the situation such that some possible actions or roles lose their point, while others acquire new significance." Antti finds intellectual models to be at risk of losing their status as a model and, instead, becoming a "surrogate reality". He finds simulacra to have taken control of us. I think this captures brilliantly Pirsig's criticism of the intellectual level.

Note that Antti makes a clear split between my work and that of Robert Pirsig. He introduces classical quality, romantic quality and Dynamic Quality as "Tuukka's concepts" and Pirsig's role as the originator of these concepts is mentioned only in a footnote. Antti ends the foreword by reporting, that he senses Dynamic Quality to be "very strongly present in Tuukka's Zen and the Art of Insanity".

Tuukka
More information www.moq.org